The Question
Do you want happiness or success?
Talking Points
- The death toll in Turkiye crossed 41,000
- Israel's president warned of 'constitutional collapse'
- Indian tax officials raided BBC's offices
- A survivor of the Thai cave rescue died
- Storm waters flooded an already-inundated New Zealand
- The EU approved a ban on fossil-fuel cars from 2035
- Russia launched costly attacks in eastern Ukraine
- Nikki Haley launched her 2024 presidential bid
- 39 migrants died in Darién Gap crossing
- Ex-Barclay's boss embroiled in Epstein sex scandal
Deep Dive
East Palestine, Ohio is choking, red-eyed, and scared for its long-term health. Thanks, Obama. And, Trump. And, Biden.
Untracked
On the evening of February 3 a Norfolk Southern freight train suffered a 'mechanical failure' near the Ohio-Pennsylvania border. It had been shooting sparks from an axle unnoticed for at least an hour. Then the weight of three locomotives and 150 carriages transformed the laws of momentum into a deadly threat. Something gave and the enormous vehicle jumped the tracks in the village of East Palestine, Ohio. The crash left 50 railway cars strewn about the tracks like oversized toys. Some of the contents spilling from these cars was pleasantly innocuous (malt liquor and frozen vegetables). But 11 toppled cars contained carcinogens that are used in plastics manufacturing: vinyl chloride and butyl acrylate. Being exposed to these chemicals can cause dizziness, breathing difficulties, and in cases of acute exposure: unconsciousness and even death.
Some of the tanks ruptured. Some burned. An itchy, irritating pall hung over the village. The persistent fire increased the pressure inside the still-intact tanks and threatened to turn them into fragmentation explosives. State and federal authorities on the scene evacuated East Palestine, and on the 5th, conducted a controlled release . The noxious chemicals were released from the tanks through bore holes, channelled away from the wreck, and burned off. A rich black plume of synthetic smoke dominated the skyline. Vinyl chloride, a vital component in PVC that has been linked to rare liver cancers, leukaemia, and lung cancer, was in the air.
East Palestine residents, encouraged to return home, found the air suffocating for days. They felt nauseous. Their eyes stung . Social media abounded with grieving residents who had come home to find their pets dead. But state officials did not report the animal deaths. Doing so would have required necropsies that are clearly not happening. Miles downstream, fish died by the thousands. Environmental Protection Agency tests concluded that the air and water around the town is safe. And yet, experts in contamination are arguing that the evidence gathered so far is insufficient: tests need to be taken from carpets, sofas, and other soft materials inside homes. At a town hall meeting this week, residents fumed at the stock reassurances of bureaucrats and the conspicuous absence of Norfolk Southern officials. One resident asked , "I have three grandbabies. Are they going to grow up here in five years and have cancer?"
The freight of expectations
This problem did not start in East Palestine, or anywhere else along that line. Nor did similar derailments of trains carrying hazardous materials in Houston and Detroit this week. In 2012, a bridge over the Delaware River in Paulsboro, New Jersey collapsed under the weight of a freight train. One of the four ruptured tanks leaked vinyl chloride into the river. The Obama administration promised reforms to increase safety and maintenance processes. But, and stop me if you've heard this before: the reforms were defanged by lobbyists. Trains carrying oil were to be subject to more stringent safety and maintenance requirements. But the chemical manufacturers and the railways carved out an exclusion for their own products. A demand to replace air brakes — a technology that has not improved dramatically in the last century — with electronically controlled pneumatic (ECP) brakes, was diluted down an "encouragement". Finally, in 2017, the Trump administration tossed out these stepped-on regulations entirely.
Railways are regional monopolies. The cost of duplicating track renders competition illogical. And the absolute necessity of industrial logistics gives these operators powerful friends in Washington. When the trains stop, America stops. The National Transport Safety Board , currently helmed by Transport Secretary Pete Buttigieg, is a paper tiger. None of which gives the likes of Norfolk Southern a strong incentive for capital expenditure on the maintenance of tracks and trains. Labour conditions and staffing levels are atrocious — the custodians of this vital infrastructure cannot do their jobs to safe standards. That's not conjecture: it's what the workers actually said when they tried to strike in December. That effort was spiked by the Biden administration on grounds that the country could not afford the disruption. Railways have carte blanche to squeeze every last cent of profit out of their ailing networks.
Don: 1, Aristotle: 0
Don DeLillo's 1985 novel White Noise thrust the famously standoffish novelist into America's popular imaginary. It's one of the finest pieces of post-modern literature of its generation: a good-humoured skewering of middle-American consumerism, academia, and the saturation of chemicals in modern life. The second part of the novel — The Airborne Toxic Event — deals with the derailment of a train carrying noxious chemicals in a rural town. Plumes of black smoke make people ill, terribly ill, and a forced evacuation order is given for the area.
Noah Baumbach interpreted White Noise for the silver screen in 2021. The less said about it, the better. What is worth your precious time is a tidbit about the casting process. Baumbach's people opted for realism: the extras escaping the Airborne Toxic Event would be good rural folk from the degraded settlements of the midwest. Some of those extras came from a small town called East Palestine, Ohio. And with that, we can finally pack in the philosophical tenet that art imitates art.
Vale, Aristotelian mimesis (b. 335 BCE, d. 2023 CE).
Worldlywise
Winners and Losers
📈 Fans of shapes
Between you and me, there is simply nothing quite as thrilling in the news cycle as when the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia debuts a new shape. We were dazzled by the power of the Orb and deeply jealous that Mohammed bin Salman, Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, and Donald Trump got to touch it. Our tongues were wagging over sheer scale of the Line . And now, it is with great pleasure that we get to share the latest form from the boffins in Riyadh, the Cube . This giant gold box will for some reason encase a space that could fit 10 Empire State Buildings. Bravo.
📈 Queen Consort Camilla
The wife of Charles III has made an auspicious decision to not wear the Koh-i-Noor diamond in her crown at the coronation. This enormous diamond, once resplendent on the Mughal Peacock Throne, apparently has a powerful blood curse placed upon it. The jewel's owners have, for most of history, suffered miserably. Ever since it was stolen by the British it has been sitting in the Tower of London, slowly rotting the spiritual fabric of the nation. Camilla has successfully dodged the curse — but she could lift it entirely by giving it back to India.
📉 New hires
Seif al-Adel has been in the top job at al-Qaeda barely two months and he already has a $10m bounty on his head. The shocking burden of high-blood pressure and heart problems that executives bear is worth considering when you see the pressure laden on them so early on.
📉 Philadelphia
Highlights
The Image
This may not look like much to the casual observer but it's a 5,000 year old pub in Iraq. It had crockery for 150, an oven, a rudimentary fridge, and a surfeit of beer. If you while away your time this weekend in a venue like this, please raise a glass for these Sumerian trailblazers. Photo supplied by AFP .
The Quote
"Low-lying communities and entire countries could disappear for ever. We would witness an exodus of entire populations on a biblical scale. And we would see ever fiercer competition for fresh water, land and other resources."
– UN Secretary General António Guterres on our current trajectory of hitting 2.4°C warming. No quip here: just a looming catastrophe.
The Numbers
362,758 recalled Teslas
- Failures in Tesla's much-hyped 'Full Self-Driving' mode have prompted yet another recall. You can teach the computer a lot of things, but correctly identifying turning lanes seems just beyond its grasp .
€1.3bn in cancelled Yeezys
- Adidas is sitting on more than one billion euros worth of shoes it manufactured with Kanye West . What one does with a few millions pairs for shoes that are culturally radioactive (and ugly as sin) is beyond us.
The Headlines
"A Yale Professor Suggested Mass Suicide for Old People in Japan. What Did He Mean?" — The New York Times. SOMEONE has been reading the Weekly Wrap.
"Winne-the-Pooh Horror Film Is a Scary Sight for Copyright Holders"
— Bloomberg . The end of copyright protections will come for everything you cherish.
The Special Mention
Our Special Mention in the field of 'Looking Busy When The Boss Is Mad' goes to the United States Air Force . Ever since a Chinese spy balloon floated by USAF F-22s have taken to the skies over North America to dogfight with privately-owned, entirely harmless scientific/weather balloons.
The Most-Read Article
'Mariana Mazzucato: 'The McKinseys and the Deloittes have no expertise in the areas that they're advising in'
The Best Long Reads
- Businessweek ponders the peculiar John McAfee
- Foreign Policy takes flight with the China hawks
- Financial Times builds a quake-proof home
Thomas Wharton
Senior Editor
The Answer...
You can only pick one. No, Marc Benioff, you really can't choose both .
